Ultimate Guide To Caring For And Training Puppies

De Jideon F Marques

A complete guide to help any puppy owner with the care and training of the newest member of their family. Everything you need to know about training and caring for your new puppy. From preparing the house and garden before the puppy s arrival, to introducing your new friend to the whole family (including children and other animals), and solving problems such as crying, waking up at night, feeding, upset stomach, biting, chewing and skip, this book contains everything you need to know as a puppy owner.

• Idioma: Português
• Editora: Clube de Autores
• Data de lançamento: 16 de dez. de 2023

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Ultimate Guide to Caring for and Training

Puppies - The Happy Puppy Handbook

Ultimate Guide to Caring for and Training Puppies

The Happy Puppy Handbook

Copyright © 2023 - Jideon Marques

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system now known or hereafter invented, without written permission from the publisher. The only exception is by a reviewer, who may quote short excerpts in a published review.

This document is aimed to provide accurate and reliable information in the light of the selected topic and all covered issues. This book is sold with the idea that the publisher is not required to render an officially permitted, accounting, or otherwise, qualified services. If advice is required in any way, professional or legal, seasoned experts of the profession should be consulted.

Every information given herein is claimed to be consistent and truthful, in case of any liability, with regard to inattention or otherwise, by any use or abuse of processes, policies, or directions contained within is solely the responsibility of the recipient reader. Under no conditions will any blame or legal responsibility be held against the publisher for any damages, monetary loss or reparation, due to the information herein.

The information herein is provided entirely for informational purposes, and it is universal. The information is provided without any type of guarantee assurance or a contract.

The trademarks that are used within the document are without any consent, and the publication of the trademark is without the backing of the trademark owner or any support. All brands and trademarks used within this book are to clarify the text only, and they are owned by their owners, not affiliated with this publication. Respective authors of the publication own all copyrights not held by the publisher.

Cover

Title Page

Part One: Preparing for your puppy

1 A new life

2 How puppies learn

3 Raising a friendly puppy

4 Influencing growth and development

5 Feeding your puppy

6 Healthcare

7 A place of safety

8 Puppy paperwork

9 Final preparations

Part Two: Life with your puppy

10 Collecting your puppy

11 Making introductions

12 Silent nights

13 Clean and dry

14 Out and about

15 Beginning the puppy recall

16 Exercise and play

17 Biting and growling

18 Communication and bonding

19 Being polite

20 Towards obedience

Part Three: Problem solving

21 The noisy puppy

22 Destructive behaviour

23 Horrible habits

24 Guarding food

25 Switching to raw feeding

26 Neutering and sexual maturity

27 The disobedient puppy

Index

Copyright

About the Book

Ultimate Guide to Caring for and Training Puppies - The Happy Puppy Handbook

From preparing the house and garden before the puppy arrives, to introducing your new friend to all the family (including children and other animals), and solving problems like crying, night waking, feeding, upset stomachs, biting, chewing and jumping up, this book is packed with all you need to know as a puppy owner.

OUR UNIQUE PARTNERSHIP with dogs is built upon ten thousand years or more of friendship and co-operation. It has weathered all the changes we have experienced together on our journey through time.

It is difficult to grasp the sheer scale of the history we share with dogs, and fascinating to consider that somewhere back in the Stone Age your own puppy’s paleolithic predecessors were being embraced into human families. The depth of this association between our two species is reflected in the privileges we now allocate to our dogs and in the emotional ties we form with them.

Our relationship with the domestic dog is truly remarkable, and every new puppy represents the chance to reaffirm the bond between us.

The addition of a puppy to your family is a significant event and should be a wonderful experience for all concerned. Your puppy will be special and unique, a product of both his own genetic inheritance and of the loving environment you provide for him. And like every new puppy, his arrival represents the promise of a new life and shared future together.

The build-up to the day you collect your puppy will be exciting and even a little daunting. You will want to do the very best you can for him, to make sure you give him the right things to eat, and the right amount of exercise. You will also want to make good choices about your puppy’s health and training. The purpose of this book is to make sure you have all the information you need to look after your puppy on a day-today basis, and to make those important decisions about his care. Above all, I want to help you make sure that your puppy becomes a happy and valued member of your family and of the wider community.

Bringing a puppy into your life is not just a question of buying a new pet. It is a bigger decision than that, a much greater responsibility and opportunity. In many ways, dogs are far more than simply pets – they are an extension of our human family.

As you await the arrival of your new puppy, you will have expectations of your life together. We all want our puppies to be clean, happy, healthy and friendly. We want them to be gentle with our children and other pets. We may look forward to long walks together, games together, resting by the fire together. We hope that our puppy will come racing towards us when we whistle and that he will learn to follow basic house rules at home.

Whilst expectations are always high, life with a puppy is not always plain sailing. New puppies are messy, untrained and can be destructive and noisy. We all know that adult dogs should be clean, obedient, quiet and well mannered. But getting from the first state to the second in the space of a few months is not inevitable, as anyone who has met an untrained and bad-mannered adult dog will tell you. Raising a good canine citizen requires the input of a willing and committed owner.

Most people accept that they will need to invest some time and effort in realising their aspirations for their puppy. They appreciate that puppies need help to grow into well-behaved dogs. But many new dog owners are unclear about the kind of help their puppy will need, or the point at which he will need it. To complicate matters, there is a lot of confusing and conflicting advice available to new puppy owners. It can be difficult to know which way to turn. Should you dominate your puppy? Or train him with treats? Can you feed him chicken? Is it spoiling him to let him sleep on your sofa

or let him eat before you? How can you be a pack leader and his friend at the same time? Are dog crates cruel, and should you teach your dog to wee on puppy pads or newspaper? There are so many questions, and so many different opinions on how to care for a puppy and how to achieve the dog of your dreams.

Throughout the next few chapters we will be building up your understanding and knowledge about how puppies learn and develop. We will look not only at the physical changes in your puppy’s body over the next few months, and how to keep him healthy, but also at what goes on inside his head. By the end of this section of the book, you will know the answers to the important questions above, and to many others, too. You won’t be dependent on outdated opinions to make good decisions for your puppy, or misled by the latest fads in dog care.

Puppies get into a lot of trouble for simply being puppies. A great deal of that trouble can be avoided if we close the gap between what is expected of the puppy and what he is capable of. Understanding what is normal for puppies is the first step in that direction.

People have speculated and disagreed for decades on the true origins of the domestic dog, but DNA testing has finally put the debate to bed. Your puppy’s ancestors were wolves, and some of the natural instincts he still carries in his genes are relics from his past and evident in his early behaviour patterns. Despite the way in which his development has been influenced by domestication, your puppy is still very much a dog. He still comes programmed with a whole bundle of instincts designed to ensure that he is fit for life as a social predator. And some of these instincts, which are perfectly acceptable in a wild-dog family, may result in behaviour that is decidedly inappropriate in our modern world. Chasing your neighbour’s cat, for example, is unlikely to go down well, yet many breeds of dog are still physically capable of hunting down and even killing small animals.

Some of your puppy’s natural instincts are actually quite useful to us. We can use his instinct for chasing moving objects to establish an excellent recall and to teach him to fetch a ball. His wolf-like instinct for keeping his den or sleeping area clean will help you to house-train him. Some puppy instincts are less helpful. Gnawing his way through the legs of your antique table, or digging up the herb garden, are rarely approved puppy pastimes, yet chewing and digging are very natural to puppies.

Just like our children, puppies need to be educated and taught that some of their most basic instincts must be kept in check. They need to learn new and often unnatural (for a dog) ways to behave. They need to be taught not to use indoor human buildings for toilet purposes, to play gently with their human friends, and to obey our commands and signals. All dogs need to be confident moving around in public places and among strangers, and to be friendly to the people they meet there.

Whilst many puppies integrate smoothly into human society and live contented lives as well-adjusted canine citizens, some do not. If not correctly managed, puppyish behaviours may persist. What was cute in a tiny puppy may be less endearing in a muddy 80lb adult. Behavioural problems, such as aggression, running away and separation anxiety, can develop and may result in dogs facing rejection by the families who not long ago awaited their arrival with excitement. Many of the problems dog owners face have their roots in early puppyhood. The great news is that the vast majority of them can be avoided, and what cannot be avoided can usually be overcome.

Educating your puppy into more grown-up behaviour is a gradual process, and often involves redirecting him into more appropriate activities or restricting his access to

your more treasured possessions. Many people get into difficulties with small puppies because they allow them too much freedom, and give them access to frequent opportunities to make bad decisions before the puppy has the self-control or knowledge to make better ones.

To begin with, the vast majority of your puppy’s free time will need to be controlled.

Life with a puppy can quickly lose its flavour if we have to spend every waking moment saying ‘No!’, ‘Stop it!’, ‘Leave that!’ Just like living with a toddler, we don’t want to be forever nagging at a puppy, so we make some changes around the house to reduce his opportunities for mischief. We’ll look at these simple preparations in more detail later on in this section, as they will make the next few weeks a great deal easier for both of you.

Gradually, as your puppy learns what is and what is not acceptable in our human world, you will be able to give him more freedom and more choices. Over the space of just a few weeks you will see some rapid changes. Of course, there may be times when you find your puppy’s behaviour challenging, or frustrating. There will be ups and downs, but with the help of this book, I hope you find the ups are many and the downs are few and far between.

Many of the instincts that our dogs have inherited from wolves are greatly diminished, some have been enhanced by selective breeding, and others lost completely. Puppies are much easier to befriend than wolf cubs, even when raised in identical circumstances. And dogs have become more skilful at reading and anticipating human behaviour.

In the light of recent research, a number of beliefs and understandings about the instinctive social behaviour of dogs have been revised or discarded. It is worth looking at these briefly, because they were widely held until just twenty years ago, and for many years the principles of all dog management and training were based upon them.

Wolves were understood to be pack animals that lived within a strict social hierarchy where a dominant animal held the position of leader or ‘alpha’ and maintained that position through physical strength and superiority. Any sign of weakness in the leader would lead to conflict and a challenge for his position of power. Dogs were believed to have inherited this social behaviour, and dog trainers believed that dogs had to be controlled and kept in their place through domination and strong pack leadership.

We now know that much of this theory was incorrect. Dogs do not tend to form packs or strict social hierarchies under normal circumstances; nor do they maintain social relationships through force or displays of dominance. Recent studies have shown that even wolves don’t form packs in quite the same way that we once believed they did.

The original research was based on unrelated captive wolves that had been thrust together in a most unnatural manner. More recent studies of wild wolves tell a different story, of animals that live in a close family unit, led usually by parents and maintained without aggression.

What this new research means for you is that you don’t need to worry about dominating your puppy, and nor should you be concerned that he will try to dominate you. Dogs may fight over resources, such as food, but dominance is not something they value. You will achieve your rightful position as the head of your puppy’s family through controlling the resources available to him as part of an effective training strategy.

Our two species have grown and evolved together over time. Whilst your puppy retains some echoes of his wolf ancestry, he will be very much a modern dog. And although his natural instincts may govern a lot of his early development, he also has a huge capacity to learn.

With every day that passes, your puppy’s newly learned behaviours will have an increasing influence on his daily activities. Just like small children, puppies have little self-control or sense of danger, and life with a puppy can be hard work. But it should also be fun. Your puppy should fit in with your life, not the other way around.

Understanding how your puppy learns, and how you can influence that process, is the focus of our next chapter. Within that understanding lies the key to a happy and enjoyable relationship with your dog. By the time you have finished The Happy Puppy Handbook, you will know how to make your puppy feel at home, how to get him to sleep at night, and how to avoid him crying excessively. You will also know how to feed him and house-train him and how to keep him healthy.

But most importantly, you will know how to ensure that he grows up well adjusted and well equipped to live in harmony with all the other inhabitants of our crazy, chaotic and cluttered human world.

SUMMARY

• Life with a new puppy can be challenging.

• Puppies need a little help to become happy and well adjusted.

• Most behavioural problems can be avoided.

THE ABILITY OF our canine friends to learn amusing tricks, and even to carry out useful tasks on our behalf, is part of their enduring appeal. We can teach dogs to herd sheep, retrieve lost items, dance to music, guide and assist their disabled owners, and even to detect total strangers buried in the rubble of an earthquake zone. Dogs are very good at learning a wide range of skills.

Teaching a puppy right from wrong ought to be straightforward enough. Yet as attitudes towards dogs have changed, there seems to be increasing confusion over how to teach our puppies what is and is not acceptable.

Dog owners may be faced with conflicting advice. Training with food or other rewards may be dismissed by traditional-style trainers as too soft or permissive, whilst traditional-style methods may be dismissed by others as too harsh.

Puppies learn very fast indeed. They learn from you and from other members of their family, but they also learn from interacting with everything else around them. We all want our puppies to ‘sit’ and ‘come here’, to ‘lie down’ and to ‘stay’. Yet in the first few weeks in their new homes, what many puppies are learning is to ‘whine’ and ‘jump up’

and to ‘snatch’ and ‘bark’. Fortunately, we have a great deal of control over this process, provided we understand how it happens. For great results, you need to be clear how the mechanism of the learning process actually works – preferably before your new puppy sets foot inside your home.

The learning process that has evolved in dogs and other mammals is very straightforward. Inside your puppy’s brain, the consequences of every single action he carries out are recorded and allocated to one of three categories. Those categories are:

•

Good (things just got better)

•

Bad (things just got worse)

•

Indifferent (nothing changed)

Which of the three categories those consequences fall into will determine how your puppy will behave next time he is in the same situation. Let’s look at some examples.

If your puppy pokes a tennis ball with his nose, it is quite likely to roll along the ground. If there is a bit of a slope, he may even get to chase after it. Things just got better for the puppy and his brain records a good consequence. Next time he sees a tennis ball, he will be likely to poke it again. On the other hand, if your puppy pokes a wasp with his nose, he may get stung, in which case things just got worse for him. A bad consequence is recorded and the puppy’s brain will look out for similar situations in the future. Next time he sees a wasp he will probably leave it alone.

Timing is a crucial factor in this process. If your puppy pokes a wasp and it flies away, then returns and stings him later, he will not connect the two and will probably poke a wasp again in the future. The consequence, good or bad, must accompany the puppy’s actions or follow very closely in order to have any effect.

This is all pretty obvious and applies to people, too. If what we do is followed by a bad thing, we don’t do it again. If what we do is followed by a good thing, we do it more often.

But what about our third category of outcomes? What if the outcome is registered by the puppy as ‘indifferent’? What happens if nothing changes? If your puppy pokes a large rock with his nose for example, rocks being what they are, he is unlikely to get a reaction. His brain adds the experience to the indifferent category.

But here is the interesting part. If there is no outcome, if nothing changes following the puppy’s actions, his behaviour is less likely to occur in the future. The effect is, in fact, the same as if the puppy had been punished. If repeated, this lack of outcome results in a process called ‘extinction’ because over time, the behaviour that it follows will die out. Here is a summary of our three outcomes and their influence on your puppy’s future behaviour.

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Good outcome = increased behaviour

•

Bad outcome = diminished behaviour

•

Indifferent outcome = diminished behaviour

The way in which